Author: Curt Bowen

On Monday night, I received the notes for Sunday’s sermon. I looked over them, read the Scripture verses, then put my phone down.

“Thursday,” I thought. “I won’t know by then.”

As I pondered the deadline, I thought back to April of 2025. That was when my brother was diagnosed with stage four cancer. He was scheduled for surgery, and they removed half of his colon. He refers to what remains lovingly as his semicolon.

But being stage four, cancer still remained on his liver. He consulted with doctors at Emory who rejected him as a candidate for surgery. Undeterred, he continued searching until he found someone willing to perform it: a group at Vanderbilt University. God bless nerds who are smarter than me.

That’s where he is right now as I type. The family group chat is full of well-wishes and prayers. There are memes of Dr. Nick, the spectacularly unqualified doctor from The Simpsons. Mr. Bean is somehow in the operating room, laughing with his mask pulled down while everyone else looks horrified. And someone posted the Monty Python hospital sketch where the doctors seem more concerned with the expensive machine that goes “Bing!” than the patient. My family has never been particularly good at being serious for very long. It’s one of the things I love about us.

What struck me Monday night was the irony of Luke 7. I had just come home from my parents’ house where we talked about my brother Connally. I asked my mom, a professional worrier, how she was doing leading up to the surgery.

And she didn’t talk about the doctors, the facilities, advances in modern medicine, or Vanderbilt. She talked about God. Although not a widow, it was a mother whose only hope in her son’s survival was in God. I felt that story told by Luke, in a totally different way.

The ingenuity of man is not stopping the end of the universe; it is certainly not bringing me back from the dead to a glorious body. We can fight death. We can delay it. Sometimes, through extraordinary people and extraordinary medicine, we can buy years from it. But we cannot defeat it.

The attorney was right that we end up in the ground. He was wrong that it’s the end. At Nain, Jesus told a grieving mother not to weep before He gave her son back (Luke 7:13). The surgeons at Vanderbilt are buying my brother time, and I’ve prayed for decades more of it. But time isn’t what any of us finally need. We need a last word, and God is the only one who has it. And when He speaks it, none will weep.

Ask Yourself:

• Who is on your heart right now that you can pray for today?
• When you’re afraid for someone you love, where do you go first?
• What would change in the way you live this week if you truly believed death is a period and not a question mark?
  
  

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Where are we in the universe? If you look at other galaxies, they’re all moving away from us. As Edwin Hubble noticed when he looked through his telescope, the light from distant galaxies shifts toward the red end of the spectrum. That redshift tells us they’re moving away from us. And they’re doing it in every direction.

Imagine a balloon with buttons glued on the outside. The buttons represent our galaxies, and the surface of the balloon represents space itself. As you blow into the balloon, any single button would see all the others move away. And if you reversed the clock, they would all collide together into a single point.

Which is what physicists believe about the universe. It’s not simply that galaxies are moving through space. Space itself is expanding. When you rewind the clock, you eventually arrive at the beginning of the universe as we know it, a beginning to space, time, and matter. Which is, more or less, what a Hebrew shepherd wrote down three thousand years before anyone built a telescope: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1).

But what about the future? As the balloon fills, the galaxies grow more and more distant. Moreover, the second law of thermodynamics states that usable energy will always be in decline. Physicists have predictions about the end of our universe that are fairly well agreed upon. They even use a theological term to describe it: physical eschatology.

Our universe will grow colder and darker. It will disperse into a thin soup. Like each of the candles at our Christmas Eve service being blown out one by one, each star will die. There will be no light, no heat, only cold elementary particles drifting into oblivion.

This is not science fiction. This is the heat death of the universe. Absent God, everything is doomed to death, not just our bodies. Which means death puts a question mark at the end of everything we do. Every orphanage, every service project, every well dug, all end in the heat death.

Known as the absurdity of life without God, this argument isn’t really an attempt to show that God exists. It draws on 20th-century atheists like Camus and Sartre, who followed their own premises where they led and didn’t like the destination.

But the deeper problem was named centuries earlier. Writing in 17th-century France, Blaise Pascal noticed that people weren’t wrestling with the big questions at all. They were avoiding them. He called it diversion: we hunt, gamble, work, and chatter precisely so we never have to sit alone in a quiet room and think about dying. Pascal’s France had card games. We have phones.

If God does not exist, then not only do we die, everything dies. And along with it go meaning, value, and purpose. The story isn’t “life is good and then it’s bad.” It’s just bad.

But that’s not the promise our God made to us. Scripture doesn’t end with everything fading into darkness. It ends with God saying, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Our God promised a new heaven and a new earth. God restores the meaning, value, and purpose in our mission trips, Big Gives, and concession cookouts.

Without God, death puts a question mark at the end of everything: Did any of it ultimately matter? But death doesn’t get to write the ending of our story. God does.

Death is a period, not a question mark. And our resurrected bodies and time with Jesus are the next sentence.

Ask Yourself:

• • What do you reach for when a quiet moment shows up?
  • Name one ordinary thing you do for God’s kingdom. What does it mean if that work is not in vain?
    
    

It’s been said that passages like Luke 7 show Jesus’ resurrection was nothing unique. The widow’s son sat up in his bier. Lazarus walked out of his tomb four days dead. Jairus’s daughter got up and ate a meal. Depending on how you count, seven or eight people in Scripture died and lived again. So why is Jesus coming back to life any more significant than theirs?

The answer is that theologians distinguish Jesus’ resurrection from revivification. Lazarus, Jairus’s daughter, and the widow’s son all came back to the same body they left. And all of them died again. Lazarus is in the ground somewhere.

Jesus isn’t. Moreover, the body He rose in was different. A glorious body, as Paul puts it (Phil. 3:21).

As you read the Gospels, do you notice that people tend not to recognize Jesus at first? Mary Magdalene takes Him for the gardener. The two on the road to Emmaus walk seven miles with Him and never place Him until He breaks the bread. The disciples fishing at daybreak don’t know who’s calling to them from the shore.

And yet it’s unmistakably Him. He tells Thomas to put a finger in the nail marks and a hand in His side. The wounds are still there. Whatever a resurrection body is, it carries a history—it isn’t a replacement.

And we’re promised the same sort of resurrected body. Paul says Christ will transform our lowly bodies to be like His glorious body. Different, glorious, and physical. Not angels on clouds. Not minds uploaded to the Matrix. New resurrected bodies.

Which raises some deep theological questions. What age will we be? Will amputees have their limbs? Or the deeper question: Will I have hair in heaven or remain bald?

I suppose you could ask whether being bald is an infirmity to be cured. My wife says it’s a feature, not a defect. She also laughed at me in the mirror this morning, so I’m not sure she’s a reliable witness. I say all this in jest, as I’ve come to terms with it. Although my barber hasn’t. He still insists on charging full price for what I see as half the work.

But beneath the silly questions is a remarkable promise. Whatever is broken in us now will not remain broken forever. If Christianity is true, then death is something to be excited for. Disabilities, disease, and aging do not have the final say. God does.

Ask Yourself:

• What would you like restored in the resurrection, and what would you want kept?
• Jesus kept His scars. What does that suggest God might do with your history?
  
  

As I walked past the mirror this morning, I stopped to look at myself.

“You are one handsome man,” I said out loud.

My wife laughed, crushing any confidence I previously had. I think it’s a guy thing to be overconfident in our looks.

But aside from aesthetic delusions, as you look into the mirror, there’s a thought experiment to consider. Think about the man or woman in the mirror you’re looking at. As I see my reflection, I’m now thinking about the man in the mirror. And I can think about the man thinking about the man in the mirror. In fact, I could keep going ad infinitum.

When you think of something, you’re thinking about something. The technical term is states of intentionality. Nothing else has this characteristic of aboutness other than our minds. In fact, our minds have all sorts of unique properties, such as free will, self-awareness, the ability to reason toward truth, and a sense of being the same you who was seven years old, even though not a single cell in your body from that year still exists.

From these phenomena, there are some philosophers who have concluded the same thing Christians have said for millennia: that the mind is distinct from the brain. What philosophers call the mind, theologians call the soul. And perhaps if the power shuts off to the brain, the soul continues to exist independently. Like a song that continues to be even if the record player stops.

If that is the case, then when your body is buried, something continues to exist beyond the funeral.

Which means the person in the mirror is more than the face looking back at you. The reflection will age. The body will weaken. One day, it will die. But the you who has been looking out through those eyes all these years may not die with it.

And if something survives the grave, the next question is what God intends to do with it.

Ask Yourself:

• What is it about you that has stayed the same since you were a child?
• When you think about you, do you think of your body, your mind, your soul—or something else?
  
  

The patio was muggy, and the air smelled bitter from cigarette smoke. A line formed around the coffee pot where people conversed. It was before cell phones, at least the kind you constantly checked, so conversation was normal, and big questions tended to come up at this place. The sort about God and life and meaning.

I distinctly remember one sitting under the awning in some recliners. An attorney much older than me struggled with the concept of finding a higher power. He was smart, as far as I could tell, but he had the strangest idea for his higher power.

“Mine is a light bulb,” he said when asked.

At the time, I didn’t have a personal relationship with God, but I knew what God was. But a light bulb? My roommate asked him a follow-up: Where do you think we go when we die? And even though it was close to thirty years ago, I still remember every word of his response.

He lowered his hardback book, looked over the rims of his thick glasses, and said:

“In the ground.”

While I admire his bravery, that thought did and does trouble me. There are so many thoughts about death that emerge from it. They’re the questions we’ll wrestle with this week.

• Where do we go when we die?
• Is there something about us that survives when our bodies don’t?
• If we’re raised again, what exactly are we raised as?
• If everything eventually dies, does anything we do now really matter?
• And what happens when these questions stop being philosophical and death comes for someone we love?

And finally, who has the correct answer? Is it the Buddhist who says there is no permanent self and seeks liberation from the cycle of rebirth? Is it the Muslim who expects resurrection and judgment before God? Or maybe the atheistic answer is the correct one: that all that happens is we end up in the ground.

I think for us as Christians, we do have something to feel a little more confident in. In Luke 7, Jesus walks up to a funeral procession, touches the bier, and tells a dead man to get up. And he does. Jesus didn’t just offer an opinion about death; He demonstrated authority over it.

And ultimately, we lean on the answer of someone who not only raised others from the dead but experienced death Himself and came back to tell us about it.

Ask Yourself:

• What do you believe happens after we die, and where did that belief come from?
• When death comes to mind, do you sit with it or change the subject?

 

In a windowless room in the basement of a church, an older man taught a Sunday school class. I had my suit and tie on and had arrived just in time, having traveled specifically to hear this particular person teach. He was considered one of the leading defenders of Christianity and, without question, the smartest person I have ever personally met.

I asked a question so obscure that I was almost embarrassed to bring it up. I wanted to know whether we were warranted in praying for events in the past. Not only did he understand my question, but he had actually written about it in a professional journal and even had a name for it: retrospective prayer.

I’m not a Taylor Swift fan, but I think I know how one feels. I had been following this philosopher and theologian for years and was an unabashed theological “Swiftie.”

After class, I ended up going to lunch with a group of regular attendees. I sat next to a younger gentleman and got to know him. He shared my passion for theology, apologetics, and philosophy.

At one point, he opened his backpack and pulled out N.T. Wright’s monumental book The Resurrection of the Son of God. This is not light reading. In fact, it’s 817 pages of some of the finest modern scholarship on the historical facts surrounding the death and resurrection of Christ.

When my new friend informed me that he had read the entire book over the weekend, I was stunned.

I reflected on something during the drive home that day.

The way that young man interacted with God was through his mind.

There are all sorts of ways to connect with God. Some people have a passion for music and experience God through lyrics, chords, and melodies. Others worship God through study. Personally, I find that I connect with God when I travel to remote places, hike through nature, and simply listen.

God spoke to people in Scripture through dreams, the testimony of others, and even burning bushes. It occurs to me that if God spoke through only one means, we might be tempted to worship the vehicle of the message rather than the Messenger Himself.

And so, God may speak in many different ways to different people.

Here’s the key takeaway:

1. Where do you hear God the loudest?
2. Wherever that is, go there—and go there during this newly allotted time we call the Sabbath.

We started this week with a simple premise: if you’re not observing the Sabbath, you’re missing out.

Not on a rule.

On something God designed specifically for you.

We put it on the calendar first. We asked what would make it feel genuinely different from the other six days. We gave ourselves permission to stop debating what counts as work and start asking what actually depletes us versus what fills us up.

And now we arrive at the most personal question of all:

Where do you hear God the loudest?

For one man, it’s 817 pages of dense theology. For another, it’s boots on a trail with nothing but wind and altitude. A chord progression. A quiet porch. A crowded room full of people who need help.

The Sabbath isn’t just a day off. It’s a standing appointment.

God has been showing up every single week.

The only question is whether you do too.

You’ve blocked the day. You’ve set it apart. Now do one final thing with that time:

Go where you hear Him.

And listen.

Ask Yourself:

• Where is the place or activity where God feels most present and real to you?

• Is that thing currently part of your Sabbath, or is it buried beneath everything that needs to stop?

 

In 1920, the number one dream job for a young child was to be a cowboy. Frankly, I don’t really understand how cowboys made money. Most of my knowledge on the subject comes from Looney Tunes cartoons and the movie Tombstone. The remaining top five dream jobs, in order, were:

1. Cowboy
2. Firefighter
3. President
4. Police Officer
5. Explorer

If I asked you to guess what they are today, you’d be right to assume they’re completely different. Not a single one is the same. In 2026, kids’ dream jobs were:

1. YouTuber
2. Professional Athlete
3. Superhero
4. AI Engineer
5. Programmer

If I’m being honest, with the exception of a handful of influencers like Mr. Beast, I’m not sure YouTubers have figured out the income thing much better than cowboys did.

But whether the dream job is wrangling cattle or chasing subscribers, the point is the same: work looks completely different today than it did even a generation ago, let alone in the days of Israel.

Which brings up a question:

What is work?

It’s not exactly clear.

You could define work as something tied to economic benefit, but then again, unpaid activities such as volunteering seem like work too. Jesus appears to be asking this very question when He asks, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm?”

Another question we might ask is this: Must an activity be revitalizing or restful in order to not be considered work?

Jesus certainly thought it was acceptable to heal on the Sabbath—or to pull your ox out of a ditch. So perhaps the answer is no. Abstaining from work does not necessarily mean engaging only in activities that are restful or rejuvenating.

I have a family member who serves every single weekend at MUST Ministries. I worked the pickup line back in May and was utterly exhausted after just one shift.

She has a very different personality than I do, though. She is an extremely sociable person—the type of person you want greeting guests at church. What I find exhausting, she finds revitalizing.

In fact, as I think about Jesus’ healings, perhaps He too was revitalized by serving others.

The point is this: don’t get hung up on what counts as work for you personally. There may be all sorts of activities—serving, creating, helping others—that would drain someone else but are perfectly life-giving for you.

Don’t let someone else’s definition of work or rest become your rule.

What depletes others might be exactly what fills you up.

Ask Yourself:

• Think about something you do—serving, creating, or helping others—that most people would call “work” but that actually energizes you. What does that reveal about how God uniquely wired you?

I had just finished paying the monthly bills at work when I got a call from my wife. She had been at the dentist for the past several hours with our two young boys.

It was not good news.

Each one had several cavities, and the bills were massive. It seemed that every trip to the dentist resulted in cavities these days, no matter how much we focused on brushing.

I hit something of a breaking point.

That evening, I announced to the family that there would be no more sugar. We were now a completely sugar-free family.

It went over about as well as if I had announced that the family dog was being given away.

My wife spoke with me that evening and asked if we could maybe soften the rule. She wasn’t opposed to limiting sugar, but could we perhaps have ONE day when the kids were allowed to eat it?

And thus, Sugar Day was born.

We picked Saturday as the family’s Sugar Day. Six days of meats, vegetables, and carbs; one day of cake, ice cream, and candy.

And voilà—the cavities went away.

The word holy means “to separate” or “to set apart.” Essentially, if you want the Sabbath to be holy, it needs to look and feel different from the other six days of the week.

That’s going to look very different for each person. It may even look different for the same person at different points in life.

What I liked about Sugar Day was that it got the entire family looking forward to the Sabbath. I remember showing up in the morning with a box of donuts and watching the kids go wild. It created natural launching points for conversations about what the Sabbath is and about who God is.

To answer Isaiah’s question, we delighted in the day.

The obvious caveat is that I’m not promoting sin. I’m not saying it’s okay to get drunk on the Sabbath. Rather, there are all sorts of activities that require discipline, effort, or willpower that we can choose to schedule around the Sabbath.

I have a friend who thoroughly enjoys running. For some people, running six days a week and not having to get out of bed on the seventh would be rejuvenating. For him, it would be the opposite.

Think through the following as possible starting points:

Would my ideal Sabbath include:

• More technology or less?

• Stimulation or relaxation?

• Sleeping in or getting out?

• More people or fewer people?

• Noise or silence?

• Indoors or outdoors?

• Familiar or new?

• Scheduled or unstructured?

• Spiritual discipline or spiritual spontaneity?

The list is endless.

The point isn’t to get the Sabbath right. The point is to get it started.

God didn’t bless the seventh day because it was perfect. He blessed it because He set it apart. Your job is simply to do the same.

Pick something. Try it. See if it draws you toward rest, toward people, and toward Him. You can always adjust.

After all, the day was made for you.

Ask Yourself:

• If you designed your ideal Sabbath starting this week, what would be the first thing on it and the first thing off it?

• What does your soul reach for when it has nothing to do?

 

During its heyday, and before it was bought out by corporate interests, I listened to every single BiggerPockets podcast. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s an online resource for all things real estate. I’ve said this many times, but despite having a degree in real estate from the Terry College of Business at UGA, I learned a hundred times more from that podcast than I ever did from my degree.

The cohosts would interview a guest—sometimes a firefighter flipping houses on the side, sometimes a commercial developer with decades of experience—and then dig for insights. At the end of each episode was their “Famous Four”: four questions they asked every guest.

1. What is your favorite real estate book?
2. What is your favorite business book?
3. What are your hobbies?
4. What sets apart successful investors from those who give up, fail, or never get started?

I don’t think it was ever officially tallied, but the book most often cited was generally agreed to be Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. However, I believe the second most-cited book was probably The One Thing by Gary Keller, co-founder of Keller Williams.

Keller’s main thesis was to identify “the ONE thing” and focus on it relentlessly until it was accomplished. When starting a business, most people worry about business cards, designing a logo, or attending networking events. But what if the ONE thing most likely to make everything else easier—or unnecessary—was simply making sales calls?

Keller’s point was that by focusing first on your most important task, even at the expense of everything else, the other things would either become easier or irrelevant.

He even had a color-coded system for his calendar. The ONE thing was written in red ink, leisure was blue ink, and meetings, busywork, and other routine tasks were black ink. I still have three gel pens in those colors clipped to my paper calendar to this day.

And he was very clear about the order in which those colors should hit the page.

He insisted that the very first color to fill your calendar should be:

BLUE INK

The leisure color. The vacations. The downtime.

The founder of the largest real estate company on the planet—and Mr. Focus himself—suggested time-blocking your rest before anything else.

What if we did that with our Sabbaths?

Using a paper-based calendar forces you to realize that time is limited. What goes on first pushes out what goes on second.

When I began blocking off days with the word SABBATH, I quickly noticed a problem. I had scheduled it on Sunday, which was also the day we hosted our couples group. Much of the day was spent cleaning, preparing materials, and cooking food. I quickly realized that by the end of the day, it hardly felt as though we had rested or been refreshed.

This is probably similar for many church staff members whose Sundays are filled with responsibilities from morning until evening.

So, we made the decision to observe the Sabbath on Saturday.

I’m aware that the Sabbath was originally observed on Saturday and that the early church shifted corporate worship to Sunday to celebrate the resurrection. That seemed like a good and appropriate decision for the early church. But if they had the freedom to make that adjustment corporately, I don’t see why I couldn’t do so individually if it meant I would actually observe the Sabbath.

Regardless, that’s not the point.

The point is that the first step toward making a day of rest real and effective is to put it on your calendar. Just as eliminating time spent on business cards in order to make sales calls requires telling ourselves “no,” blocking out a full day for Sabbath requires the same thing.

The Hebrew calendar refers to the Sabbath as a מוֹעֵד (moed), meaning an “appointed time.” God essentially put it on His calendar and invited Israel to show up.

The implication is simple: if it’s not on your calendar, you’ve declined the appointment.

Ask Yourself:

• What would happen if I wrote the word SABBATH in all caps on one day of my calendar every week?

• How strong is my ability to say “no”? Is it harder to tell myself “no” or to tell others “no”? Which obligations would be the most difficult to decline, and how could I do so politely but firmly?

I once had lunch with a friend who serves as a pastor at another church. The church was doing well, and people were being saved. I’ve never been on a church staff myself, but I have known many who have. Ministry has been described to me as one of the most difficult jobs you never want to quit. Every person I’ve known in ministry has been an extremely hard worker, and this friend was no exception.

There was just one problem as our conversation continued.

He was utterly exhausted.

I mean the kind of exhaustion you can see on someone’s face. It prompted me to ask him a simple question:

“How is your Sabbath?”

“Terrible,” he replied.

I’ll share with you over the next week what I shared with him, but there’s one overarching theme to my view of the Sabbath:

If you’re not observing the Sabbath, you’re missing out.

It isn’t another checkbox to mark off each week; it’s the complete opposite. It’s the absence of checkboxes. If the Sabbath is meant to be enjoyed and was designed for man—not man for the Sabbath—then why wouldn’t you want to keep it? You may need to change some settings on your phone, decline a few appointments, or let the house get a little dusty. It may feel like work is piling up for 24 hours, but you can accomplish more with six days and God than with seven days on your own.

One disclaimer: while some teachings about the Sabbath seem clear, others are not quite so obvious. “Do not work” seems fairly straightforward, but “What counts as work?” may not be. We need to approach different people and situations with humility and grace. So, if I describe ways that my family and I have found helpful in observing the Sabbath, feel free to adapt them—or disregard them entirely. After all, the moment you create a definitive list of do’s and don’ts surrounding the Sabbath, you begin to sound an awful lot like the Pharisees and their traditions.

Having said that, let’s make sure you don’t miss out.

Ask Yourself:

• Do I observe the Sabbath? Do I view it as another checkbox or as the absence of checkboxes?

• Do I enjoy the Sabbath? If it came up in conversation, would I describe it as a “delight” the way Isaiah did?